by Adam Burch
“I want to make you remember who you are so you can bring this system of patriarchy crashing down. Then only I will be left to rebuild the world in my image.”
“And they say I’m the singer.” I smile ruefully. “You’re the one who sings so sweetly.”
I’m a singer? Yes, I’m a singer.
“We use the gifts we’re given,” she says evenly. “Do you have the stones to use yours? For Nadia.”
The glass drops from my hand and shatters on the floor. Nadia. My love. Memories pour into my brain like too much sand in a sieve—Bone. My mother. Nadia. Gorham. The Maestro. All dead. My unborn child. Pain. He murdered them. Edric murdered them. He tried to brainwash me. He tried to make me forget. He lobotomized then murdered my mother. I scream and collapse to the floor clutching my head in my hands.
“Edmon?” Lavinia kneels next to me.
I grab her fiercely by the arms. “Don’t speak her name!”
She winces at my grip but smiles. “Now that’s the brother I remember.”
“I remember, too,” I say. “Everything.”
“Good. Then act,” she whispers.
I look around at the crowd, the guards, The Companions, my father . . .
There are too many to fight physically. Even if I could win, what would I do after?
Lavinia points to the dozens of camglobes hovering the rooftops, broadcasting the celebration all across Tao. “You have an audience. Tell them the truth about the murders that Edric Leontes commits.”
Our father may kill me. Lavinia may win. So what? Use the gifts I am given . . . I’ll destroy Edric and avenge my love. Lavinia is right. There is more than one way to fight.
I walk to the orchestra, to the first chair electric viola. I rip the magnetic amplifier off his instrument and pin it to the lapel of my suit. The man protests so I punch him in the face, breaking it. There is an intense hiss of feedback as the amplifier adjusts to the new sound source. I make my way to the middle of the dance floor. I raise my arm, signaling that everyone should come to a silence. My father stands behind the wedding table. Miranda gapes like a hooked cod. The camglobes hover and converge on my location. They orbit around me like moons.
“Today we celebrate the union of two noble houses of Tao!” I toast. The guests erupt in cheers. “A bond between the long and storied, now sick and dying, behemoth of House Wusong, and the lowborn, inauspicious, young upstarts of House Leontes!” The applause now comes with a tepid pitter-patter. Is this praise? they wonder. “All in an attempt to consolidate power and move us forward to a new future. A blind future.”
I look to The Companions. Perdiccus grins. Sigurd glowers. Hanschen rests lazily on Phaestion’s arm. Phaestion’s eyes flare with interest.
“People of Tao, this marriage is a farce!” Cries erupt from the audience. “I was drugged and forced; my words were not my own this day. I resist now in telling you. You, too, must resist. It is not the circumstance of our births that define us, but how we choose to live!”
My father grabs Alberich and tells him to send for the guards.
“Those born with the title, noble, have done nothing to earn that gift. I stand here before you the son of a lowborn and of mixed race, but I’m a free man who chooses to struggle against the oppression. Oppression that says one person is better than another. Oppression that says this one should live while that one dies. Oppression of brother against brother!” I look at Phaestion. “And oppression of the father against the son.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lavinia smile with sinister glee.
“My gift is not a Combat. My gift is an elegy for all those who have died in the struggle.”
Guards hustle into the reception area. My father directs them to surround me. I look Edric square in the face, and I sing. I sing the song that The Maestro wrote the words for. I sing the song my mother sang to me as I child. I sing the song the people call “The Song of Edmon.”
Edric’s jaw tightens. The veins stand out like cords in his neck. His hands clench with the intention to strangle me, but now he’s the one who stands frozen and impotent. As do they all. The Maestro knew this day would come—the day we lost. The words he wrote to the tune my mother taught speaks of a last glimmer of hope’s light against darkness. I reach the climax, and my voice rises in the cool twilight like a beacon. I force back tears.
Nadia and my poor unborn child. I won’t forget you, but I will not let them see me cry. I will not let them see me break.
Silence hangs between me and the rest of the world—a vast gulf unable to be crossed.
Lavinia smiles like a shark. Phaestion shakes his head, each of us lost to the other. Edric yells, “Seize him!” All hell breaks loose.
I stand in one of my father’s bedrooms in a Wusong-Leontes scraper, several miles from the remains of the party. My hands are bound. I’m bleeding from the mouth.
“Wipe the shit-eating grin off your face,” my father snarls.
“Wipe it yourself. You’re the one who put it there,” I retort.
He backhands me with his fist. My nose breaks, and I crash to the floor. My eyes water so that I can hardly see. Blood drips onto the marbled floor. Edgaard and Alberich stand like sentinels at the door, presumably to prevent me from making some kind of mad dash for freedom. I laugh. I don’t want freedom. I just want it all to be over.
“Edmon, I’ve tried,” Edric begins calmly. The throbbing in my face keeps me from a smart-ass response. My tongue feels like a thick rubber slab in my mouth. “I’ve showed you mercy and compassion—”
“Mercy? Is that what you showed me? Is that what you showed my mother? Is that what you showed Nadia? My unborn child?”
“A quick death is a mercy. It would be a mercy for you as well, but you are no longer deserving. There is more at stake than your petty desires and your insignificant teenage longings. A whole planet hangs in the balance. I’ve tried to bring you into the fold. I’ve tried leaving you to your own devices. Yet you will not shut up!”
His scream echoes through the chamber.
His voice drops deadly low again. “All you had to do was wait, fool. You could have stayed tucked away and forgotten. I was wrong to think you would do that. Who knows what damage you’ve caused here tonight. I will not be humiliated by you again. I will end you without mercy. Take him to the Wendigo.”
He nods at Alberich, and I’m dragged from the room.
MOVEMENT II: INTERMEZZO
CHAPTER 16
TREMOLO
My hands are bound. My head is covered. I see nothing. I feel the hum of a sondi engine and discern I’m in a passenger compartment full of bodies. We rock and bump together, packed like sarfish in a can. The dirigible banks its way over the frozen wastes of the Nightside. At least that’s what I imagine. The temperature in the cabin drops perceptibly. I calm myself, breathe slowly, and try not to shiver.
“Approaching drop zone,” a metallic voice cuts in over the speakers.
Then the voice of the corrections officer sounds to my left.
“Worms! We’re approaching your new home. This is merely a dump of cargo. Therefore we need make no touchdown. We’ll hover approximately three meters over the deposit site where each of you will disembark.”
It sounds like they won’t be rolling out the plush carpets. Someone whimpers underneath his hood. I hear the corrections officer kick him in the gut.
“Quiet! You will stay at the deposit site until retrieval. If you attempt escape, you will be executed. If you do not follow all instructions, you will be executed. If you cause any problem in any way that might look bad on one of my reports, you will be executed. If on the off-chance you are able to escape the shooters, you have nothing but a continent of frozen tundra and endless dark in every direction. May the Elder Stars watch you. May the ancestors pray for you. No one else cares. Welcome to the Wendigo.”
The carriage door opens, and a blast of icy air slams me even through the neoprene bodysuit I’ve been issued. I can barely b
reathe. Someone pulls me to standing. Bodies around me shuffle toward the cold air. My hood is ripped off, and I find myself at the open door of the sondi. All is darkness and stars, millions of pinpricks of sapphire in the black firmament, each a sun with worlds, and those worlds full with people. I dream those people are kinder than the ones here. Someone shoves the small of my back, and I fall.
I hurtle toward the ground but don’t travel far. I try to tuck my chin and roll, but with my hands bound and the disorientation of the cramped twelve-hour journey, my effort is more of a spastic flail than anything else.
“Roll, maggot!” someone yells.
I try but am quickly grabbed by the scruff of the neck. A guard yanks me away just in time to avoid another falling body as it slams into the icy hardpack.
I stand in a small pool of light next to the scaffolding of a tower. Ice and snow swirls everywhere. I curl my arms close and huddle next to the other wayward souls. A wall of darkness is all that is beyond the patch of dim light from the tower. No horizon, just a formless and impenetrable curtain stretching to eternity.
“Stop!” the armored guard who pulled me to my feet screams.
A fellow prisoner sprints into the darkness.
“Stop or we fire!” the guard yells again, but the runner is gone.
Then the red dot of a laser sight alights. Bang! The shot is fired from the tower above. The guard beside me holds up his wrist communicator. “You get ’em, Greelo?”
“Got ’em, Sookah,” the voice chimes back.
I look to the tower. Greelo sets the high-powered sniper rifle against his shoulder calmly.
“Listen up, maggots!” Sookah holds a voice amplifier to his snow mask. “You will form a line here.” He points at the ground.
We shiver and shuffle slowly into place. Bang! The rifle echoes again.
The man behind me drops. “My leg! They shot my leg!”
“Move faster next time,” Sookah says. “Or next aim is your skull.”
“I prefer to blow the stones!” Greelo’s voice cuts in over the communicator. Sookah guffaws.
I lift the injured man from the ground. He’s small and dark-skinned, an islander like me. He can no longer walk unassisted with the bullet lodged in his thigh.
“Thank—”
“Shut up!” I hiss through my teeth. My lips crack in the freezing cold.
“Hook your bindings to the belt of the man in front of you and prepare for descent,” announces Sookah.
“Descent?” the injured man whispers.
“Quiet!” I reiterate. “Or you’ll get us both killed.”
The man looks no older than fifteen because of his diminutive stature, but the lines on his face are etched deep, denoting a lifetime much longer than my own. I clip the chains from my wrist bindings to a loop on the belt of the man in front of me. The guard walks back to inspect the line. He stares at me as I shoulder the weight of the scrawny man behind me.
“Man can’t move on his own,” Sookah says. “Best leave him to drag, otherwise you’re both done.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I reply.
The guard pulls a humbaton from his belt. He cracks me across the ribs with it. I wince as I feel bone break. “I didn’t say you could talk, maggot,” he growls. He straps on a pair of infrared goggles as he leads our shuffle from the pool of light into black.
It feels even colder once the lamplight is absent. I’m disoriented in the pitch, as if swimming in a dark tub of ice. A cry of desperation sounds in front of me. My arms are yanked forward. My footing falls away. I tumble down an icy slope. It feels like forever as ice and rock abrade my skin. The slide finally stops, and I try to stand, but I’m bruised, my ribs broken. My foot slips on the ice. I feel myself about to fall over the edge of something and into a chasm. The scrawny man behind me pulls me back, saving me.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Call it even,” he whispers back. “I’m Toshiro Kodai. Friends call me Toshi.”
“Edmon,” I say in return.
“Leontes?” he questions. “I thought I recognized your face in the light a moment ago!”
There is a loud clicking sound, and lights suddenly blind us. We’re standing on the edge of a hole bored into the ice about ten meters wide and far deeper than my eyes can see. An ice arcology, I think. A string of intense fireglobes illuminates a sheer drop into blackness. The frozen rungs of a rickety metal ladder are bolted to the side of the chasm. I kick a stone into the pit. I wait. Finally, a pop echoes back from the black.
“Start crawling, maggots!” Sookah yells, pointing at the icy ladder.
A burly, scarred man with tattoos at the front of our chain eases himself down the first of the metal rungs. I nod to Toshi. He saved me from the fall; I’ll make sure he gets to the bottom alive, even with the wound in his leg. My eyes adjust to the Nightside darkness. I look up and out onto the horizon, and I can barely make out several blinking lights. They don’t move, so they must be attached to some kind of structure.
“What’s that?” I whisper.
The guard called Greelo, who has come down from rifle duty in the tower, sees me point. I feel rather than see him smile underneath his mask. “The Citadel, maggot. Pray you never do time there.”
The lights of the Citadel blink back. I can’t make out the shape of any building, so if there’s something out there, it’s as dark as the night.
I feel a tug on my bindings. It’s my turn to descend the ladder. The guard raises his humbaton as if to strike me for my idleness. I could rush him, take the weapon from him, beat him with it, blast the sonic pulse to scramble his brain, but then what? I’d be dead. This is all a game. A game where I am the weak worm. I must make him feel powerful in order to survive.
I throw my hands in the air, feigning a desperate attempt to protect myself. Greelo laughs at the display. I crawl past him and begin the climb down the slippery rungs of the ladder.
One foot in front of the other. We follow the string of fireglobes, down and down. We go deep into the very crust of the planet. The temperature rises to just above freezing. The pain in my hands and the hurt of each breath is lessened by the sheer terror I have of falling. Toshi shakes above me, flinching every time he puts pressure on his wounded leg.
“Easy, Tosh,” I say, more to comfort myself than him. If he slips and falls, I will be right behind him.
Then the tattooed man at the lead of our line does slip. Each man who follows comes off the ladder, pulled by the weight of the man before. I quickly snake my leg between a rung as the human chain goes taut. I yowl as the weight of at least a dozen prisoners ahead of me is suspended over the chasm by the tensile strength of my femur.
“Help!” The man’s screams echo off the cavern walls.
“Cut that prisoner loose now!” Sookah commands from above.
“No!” I shout. I feel the bone in my thigh bending. My skeleton is strong, but even this strain is too much. “No one falls!” I scream out in defiance.
“Prisoner, unhook your manacles from that prisoner now, or I will come down and unhook both of you!”
“No!” I shout back. My eyes connect with the man second in line. He immediately stops trying to unhook.
“Ancestors, help me!” the tattooed man cries hysterically.
I feel my bone splintering. The guard rappels along the wall next to me. His crampons dig in, and chunks of ice wall splash as he boots off the surface. His auto-belay slows beside the tattooed prisoner. The man flails, trying to grab hold of the ladder. The guard reaches out with a pair of electrified clippers. He snips the chain connecting the man’s belt to the manacles of the prisoner behind him.
“No!” I shout. Too late. The tattooed man falls. Another death I’m unable to prevent.
We hear screams for a long moment grow faint until they’re suddenly cut off. The only sound then is the guard’s auto-belay reeling him back above us. I steady myself on the slick rungs. My ribs throb. Blood rushes through my leg.
“Start moving, maggots!”
The chain of prisoners resumes its descent. Sookah doesn’t take his goggled eyes off me the rest of the journey.
We climb for hours. I lose track of time in the darkness and cold. Finally, the tunnel widens, and a light at the bottom brightens. The fireglobes give off no heat, but even dim light in this winter land gives the sense of warmth. I feel that I’ve climbed into an abyss from which I’ll never return, and I shiver.
One by one, we shuffle off the ladder, our fingers and toes numb and aching. I rub my leg. I can already feel the microfractures beginning to heal. Sookah and Greelo lead us through a dark tunnel that opens into a huge cavernous space lit by fireglobes, torches, and campfires. A shantytown of ramshackle buildings spreads out inside this massive underground cave. Prisoners, all men, are decked out in bundled rags and furs, and mill about or huddle around bonfires. They look like barbarians, faces covered thick with filth and beards.
Greelo slams a mallet into a large gong. It reverberates through the cavern, and the wooly heads of the prisoners turn to us. Suddenly, they’re on their feet, and the giant crowd of strangers surrounds us. They claw at us and push us forward.
Several more guards appear. They hold the crowd back with humbatons. “Make way!” they shout occasionally, firing a sonic pulse from their humbatons into the crowd.
The stink of bodies and refuse is oppressive even in the freezing cold. A human corridor is formed. We’re pressed through it like mashed waste through an intestine. Toshi holds my shoulders to keep from collapsing.
“Edmon, I’m going to be sick,” he says, groaning.
“Just hang in there.”
It’s no use. He doubles over and pukes all over my feet.
“Keep moving, worms!” a guard shouts at us. We arrive at the center of the cavern, and the prisoner at the front of the line is shoved up onto an auction block.
“Ragnar Erlichson!” A fat man wearing a uniform with the insignia of House Wusong-Leontes names the prisoner.
